UCLA In the News January 21, 2015

“What’s different about Airbnb and other sharing-economy firms is that the wall between market strategy and non-market strategy like politics is completely broken down,” said Edward Walker, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA and author of “Grassroots for Hire,” a book about industry campaigns to mobilize the public for political advocacy. “A lot of the action is on the local level where you need a municipal strategy in place which requires a huge amount of specific local knowledge.”

I called Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and author of the book “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” “A gun dealer can be held liable for negligence,” Winkler said. “But it’s very difficult.” Removing the lawsuit immunity, he asserted, could force manufacturers to be more cautious about selling to negligent dealers. “I don’t think anyone in gun control believes it’s a panacea,” he said. “But it could have an impact.”

What’s more, getting less sleep did not appear to reduce their cognitive abilities, and they were all generally healthy, says lead author Jerome Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles in the U.S. This suggests they were sleeping enough.

Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, offered a rosy forecast for the Bay Area. “There will continue to be solid growth in the Bay Area,” Nickelsburg told the conference… Nickelsburg, though, warned that the real perils for the Bay Area and California could come from internal factors, especially if the so-called tech “unicorns” — privately owned technology upstarts that have raised $1 billion or more in funding — encounter sour fortunes in their revenues or business models.

“Most mass shootings have not triggered quite this great an increase in gun purchasing,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. He attributed a jump in background checks nationally to the fact that the incident was an act of terrorism, the wall-to-wall media coverage it received, and the public conversation about gun control that followed, including from President Barack Obama. “The fear of new gun control leads to more gun sales,” Winkler said. (Also: San Francisco’s KCBS-AM [audio download])

“It’s a strange thing when you know you’ve arrived on the scene for the 2016 election because Donald Trump is attacking you,” said UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck. “There’s definitely a sense of anger and anxiety, I think, out among the electorate… and both [Sanders and Trump] are tapping into that. They’re starting to sound the same because they’re both tapping into that dimension.” (Vavreck was also interviewed on Donald Trump and Sarah Palin on another CNN segment)

But UCLA rheumatologist Dr. Veena Ranganath conducted a brief review of commonly used drug package inserts and said she didn’t find any association with ulcerative colitis…. Ranganath worries that Frey’s manager’s comments will persuade some people with rheumatoid arthritis, also known as RA, to avoid taking medications for it. “The benefits of treatment of RA do outweigh the risk,” she said. “But this is a really important conversation you need to address in detail with the rheumatologist.”

The typical black student attends a school that is less than 10 percent white, according to research from the UCLA Civil Rights Project. And these facilities are far from equal: Black students are more likely to attend schools with less qualified teachers, high poverty rates and lower state and local per-pupil funding.

HTT’s research suggests a Hyperloop capsule will pull 1.5 g in a 15-mile turning radius. That’s “quite a lot,” noted Craig Hodgetts, chief architect of the project and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He added that HTT also doesn’t see any practical way to “slow capsules down to any degree in order to maneuver,” meaning there will have to be a “very sophisticated analysis of speed, route, and sensation.”